![dyke (genealogy) / alt: a letter to my grandfather in this first year of silence by [sarah] Cavar](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5510a228e4b0519d684008a9/56c1e2bf-b6a2-4ef4-b1b5-270c4b0fcee0/453b88d1-df4a-44ab-9f61-a2fadad2acd3.jpeg)
Bruise-tremor of language—
a book of lush silences
inhaled, held breath
You don’t know where they came from only that they’re here now, and the email from the arborist says kill kill kill…
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Your mother has been here for many years,
or at least it feels that way.
She does the necessary things without acknowledgement,
as if it is part of her training.
Says, a prayer is still a prayer even
if it only finds your lips while you
a reseized in pain, or need, or
quiet desperation, says,
make a mosque of this body,
Tonight, May is a sweet pink
grapefruit, sliced in half.
Squeezed from clouds, sticky
rain tangos down my bare legs
and pools in my heels
like bunched socks.
I begin to break my mother’s heart the day I leave Zimbabwe on an unseasonably cold August day, brown leaves raining down from the Msasa trees.
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The Manananggal crouches in my womb, counting my little eggs as if they were hers for breakfast.
She doesn’t like me and I don’t like her, but we are cursed to inhabit each other.
![Al-Waqi'ah [56:27]: before touching a lover by Qurat Dar](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5510a228e4b0519d684008a9/1679620862150-7RQD4HLIXLSFXIU9RKLP/pexels-raphael-brasileiro-1686944.jpg)
You imagine fingers forgetting
themselves, dexterity disappearing,
a sense numbing itself out of shame,
the hailstorm
the steaming bath tub
dad walked me home
and we got caught
big hail fist balls big dark
on the evening of Lunar New Year’s eve,
a petal of dishes sit in the center.
guazi fish dipped in diced onions and soy sauce,
barbeque roast pork, bok choy in garlic,
and my mother’s signature dish—
I remember that I have stolen
what was once mine
and in the banality of my death
a door
derived from vas vascular redirects here
arteries capillaries
arterioles venules
veins
Every April, Canada celebrates National Poetry Month. The League of Canadian Poets, a national non-profit organization, leads the charge and hosts an array of contests, events, and writing projects for poets and poetry lovers alike. For 30 days, we revel in the power of verses, enjambment, blank spaces, and rhythm. Most importantly, we cherish the ability to craft stories about the world and ourselves in an artistic form that has morphed over centuries and continues to reach new dawns.
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we are melting twice as fast
here in the north, the north
above us, three times over
the rest.
under flared cone of porch lamp and the aluminum bowl, water
and the white knuckles of cauliflower. they and tomatoes
sit duel-bodied as greedy prayers over the rushed heart.
Perss prses psse press it down with a tongue depressor look inside is it healthy is it
tall has it been drinking milk from goats the doctor is in and he looks you in the eye
after one summer when she went to camp, got stung by a bee
and nearly died.
It is a bone-chilling Sunday morning and I am leaning against a granite counter, waiting for my soy milk flat white. The side of my hip digs into the cold stone as I survey the coffee shop. The barista draws a four-petal leaf on top of my warm drink.
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